In his Techcrunch article, Samuel Scott scoffs at buzzwords such as “content marketing”, dismissing these technobabble as something not unusual from what marketing departments have been doing ever since.

He says: “Marketing has always been the creation of a message, the insertion of that message into a piece of content and the transmission of that content over a channel to an audience in an effort to build brands, increase demand and move people down sales funnels. The same is true today — the only differences are that we have two additional sets of available channels, called the Internet and mobile devices, and those channels allow for a greater variety of content formats…All marketing is ‘content marketing’ because all marketing uses content.”

For Samuel, content marketing and inbound marketing are really just direct marketing.

So what spurred the rise of these repackaged concepts then?

“Startups live or die based on precise analytics and growth rates, and direct marketing platforms easily provide these metrics,” notes Samuel. “Whether one’s desired direct marketing channel is email or Google AdWords or Facebook, all of those platforms come with precise data that can measure opens, ‘likes,’ clicks and shares, as well as any resulting purchases, conversions or downloads. A/B and multivariate tests can be run to squeeze out every possible increase in conversion rates.”

That said, how do you create amazing campaigns that can seamlessly be applied on any promotional tool you choose, whether it's advertising, publicity, or even direct marketing?

Over the years, top marketing professionals and businessmen have dispensed timeless nuggets of advice from which we can glean important truths on how to build awesome marketing strategies.

Below, we’ve curated eight tips from the masters themselves:

Let Research Light, But Not Blind, Your Way

“How do you decide what kind of image to build? There is no short answer. Research cannot help you much here. You have actually got to use judgment. (I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post, for support rather than for illumination.)” - David Ogilvy

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.” - Steve Jobs

Never Underestimate the Power of a Happy Customer

"Word of mouth is the best medium of all." - William Bernbach

“If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.” - Malcolm Gladwell

Don’t Just Promote a Product; Create an Experience

“People have enough stuff, but they don’t have enough meaning.” – Seth Godin

“Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.” - Leo Burnett

Go Beyond the Clickbaits: Actually Deliver Something Valuable

“Anyone who thinks that people can be fooled or pushed around has an inaccurate and pretty low estimate of people.” - Leo Burnett

“If you have anything really valuable to contribute to the world, it will come through the expression of your own personality, that single spark of divinity that sets you off and makes you different from every other living creature." — Bruce Fairchild Barton

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